Michele O’Neil, National Secretary of the TCFUA yesterday said, ‘This is a devastating blow to these workers, their families, this industry and Australia. We are not talking just the 1850 jobs losses announced today, the likely spin off effect on suppliers and other companies in the industry could well see thousands more jobs lost.’

‘The Union does not accept that the complete closure of these sites is necessary.

A number of the brands and divisions of this business continue to be profitable whilst manufacturing in Australia.

This company has received millions of dollars of Federal Government Assistance over many years. This includes $9 million in 07/08 and $8.6 million in 05/06 of taxpayers’ money.

How can a company take from the Australian Government and the Australian community for years without a mutual obligation to keep jobs in Australia?’

‘I have spoken to the industry Minister Kim Carr and he has agreed to participate in urgent discussions with the company aimed at saving jobs. I call on Pacific Brands to genuinely participate in such a discussion, we do not accept that this decision is inevitable or that jobs cannot be saved.’ Pacific Brands own many iconic Australian labels including Bonds, Holeproof, Kayser, KingGee and Yakka. Their manufacturing sites are spread across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

O’Neil went on to say, ‘The majority of the workers employed by this company are migrant women who have long years of service, their prospects of finding alternative work in the current economic crisis are grim.

The Federal Government has not released it’s response to the Textile Clothing and Footwear Industry Review, the report of which was given to the Government in August of 2008.

The Union and TCF Industry leaders last week wrote to the Prime Minister seeking his direct involvement in discussions about the urgent need for an industry assistance package for the TCF Industry.’

‘The Government must act urgently and decisively to save jobs.’

For details of the TCFUA submision to professor Roy Green’s review of the TCF industry, see Make it here website.

http://www.makeithere.com.au/home/index.htm

See also the Fairwear campaign

www.fairwear.org.au/engine.php

See Asian Women at Work

http://www.awatw.org.au/fairwear/index.html

Job guarantee requied

The problem, labor groups said, is especially prevalent across the Pearl River Delta, China’s main manufacturing hub.

Thousands of factories have been shuttered in recent months, and at least 20 million internal migrant workers across China have lost their jobs, the government reported. In many cases, workers have been let go with no prior notice and without final wages, let alone the severance required in accordance with the year-old law.

“There are indeed many such cases in Guangdong (province) now,” said Liu Kaiming, head of the Institute for Contemporary Observation, a Shenzhen-based foundation for migrant workers’ rights.

“In order to keep the employment rate up, some local governments have tried to suspend some parts of the law, and there has been lax enforcement of existing regulations.”

Marked by Controversy

The national labor law, passed in 2007 and taking effect Jan. 1, 2008 (127 DLR A-2, 7/3/07), was touted as the first tangible, nationwide law protecting workers’ rights across China.

Many companies already facing higher costs, including some American businesses, complained that provisions in the law making employee terminations more difficult, were too onerous. During its first year, the law reportedly increased business costs markedly across China.

But with world demand for Chinese-made goods down significantly amid the global economic crisis, local governments now are allowing the law to fall by the wayside.

Companies, strapped for cash, have been allowed in some jurisdictions to ignore the law’s protections to keep employees on their payrolls.

But labor groups have little sympathy for businesses trying to save costs by skirting the law.

“Since the beginning of the economic crisis, we’ve heard constant complaints from companies, and governments have made much effort to help them,” said Ivy Yu, a coordinator with the Dagongzhe Migrant Workers’

Center in Shenzhen. “But I think all this should never be done at the cost of the rights and interests of workers.”

Lax Local Enforcement

Yu is particularly critical of reports that some local governments have issued special guidelines to companies in southern China, allowing them to skirt particular provisions of the law when instituting layoffs and other employee terminations.

“The crisis is temporary, and it’s conquerable,” Yu said.

“But if the government chooses to sacrifice workers’ interests and rights, issuing some unreasonable ‘guidelines,’ and the interests citizens are not protected, then the price they pay will be very high … people will have doubts about justice.”

In response to widespread complaints, the State Council earlier this month issued a regulation requiring companies to give 30 days’ notice when implementing mass layoffs. The regulation urges local governments to keep an eye on companies that implement layoffs, to ensure that final wages and insurance benefits are paid.

But like other laws in China, the final say often rests with law local enforcement. One vice mayor of Dongguan, the heart of the southern manufacturing center, has even asked the central government to suspend the law entirely.

“That’s ridiculous but we know there must be many companies complaining to him about the new labor law,” Yu said. “Companies never really welcomed this law and have always had some kind of resistance to it.”

A mark of the power of his prose is that while I was reading Blindness, I became afraid to blink because that was one of the moments after which many of the characters lost their sight. Despite this response, by the time I was two-thirds of the way through Saramago’s 300 pages, it dawned on me that he had failed. His picture of a society in which no one could see was mild by comparison with what such a catastrophe would be like.

True, there is shit everywhere. Thugs retain their guns and try to rule it over the rest. Dogs devour corpses in the streets. There is no running water, no food supplies, no power, not communications. Were a plague of universal blindness to befall a society, minute-by-minute existence would be several times more intolerable than the one Saramago portrays.

To make any story possible, he had to keep one character able to see, a fact she conceals from almost everyone in the group she protects. I won’t spoil the plot by revealing the end, but it is of a piece with the understatement of the horror, the horror.

Since the global economy went into a tailspin, my mind has returned to Saramago’s novel and to these doubts about its portrayal of terribleness. Just as a creative writer could not represent the awfulness of universal blindness, so who among us can face up to how thorough-going the crisis in the accumulation of capital might become? This failure is widespread here with talk of Australia being the only country likely to avoid recession. At least, mush about riding out on the global downturn on the China boom has disappeared.

Still less are we able to imagine what everyday life would be like during a global depression that deepened throughout a decade. The worst that most of the Left are able to conjure up is fascism.
An Argentinean acquaintance gave me reminder of what happens when the banks close. A government guarantee of deposits is not the same as access to those funds on demand. Shortly after Wall Street began to implode in September, she remarked: “This is why we came to Australia.” She recalled the freezing of assets in her homeland; how no one had seen it coming; no one knew what to do day by day, or minute by minute. She lost most of her possessions in the battle to survive. She also lost faith in her country, and immigrated. That disaster was only in one country.

Now, she knows what to expect if the worst happens. She has put all the money she can muster into accounts from which she can withdraw instantly. At the same time, she is building up a horde of $2-coins and five- and ten-dollar notes: “They need to be small denominations because no one will have change.” And she is stocking up on dry goods.

Anyone who has looked disaster in the face will never forget it. Behaviours that appear bizarre are to people like her no more than the precautionary principle. If the worst does not happen, she can still spend the money and eat her tinned beans.

Measures to help a household through the first weeks of a total collapse are no help in forming collective action. Similarly, wallowing in catastrophes is no way to forge a program. Chanting “capitalism must collapse one day” leaves the Left no better placed to cope with that actuality than are the pundits who cannot accept that the past eighteen months has happened.

The policies needed to deal with 6 percent unemployment will be useless if the deflationary spiral drives that rate to 30 percent reached in the early 1890s and early 1930s.

Being able to conceive of the worst is a precondition for devising tactics and a strategy even for the medium term.

The analogy of universal blindness is not aimed at scaring ourselves witless.

The hope is that gathering the courage to stare the storm in its eye might prevent our being rendered sightless if the system is blown away.

Financial crisis and democratic public finance

He was capitalising manufacturing capitals. Humphrey McQueen continues his series.

His banking bills organised capital just as his sending the army into the coalmines disorganised labour.

Chifley shared the labour movement’s distrust of bankers before an openly anti-labour government appointed him to the Royal Commission on Banking in 1935. His eighteen months as Commissioner allowed him to refine his prejudices as he gathered testimony about the banks’ reluctance to invest in manufacturing. In Britain, the 1931.Macmillan Committee had revealed a comparable problem.

As Treasurer from October 1941, Chifley used the Defence Power in section 51(v) of the Constitution to implement many of the Royal Commission’s recommendations. Knowing that those Regulations would lose their force during the transition to peace, Chifley secured Acts in 1945 to make them permanent.

This Act was crucial to reconstructing capitalism after the 1930s depression through four interdependent projects: unemployment of no more 5-7%; industrialisation (eg General Motors); powered by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Authority, to support a doubling in the population, half through mass migration.

Controls over banks was essential for this program.

The 1945 Act made State and local governments bank with the Commonwealth, which gave its Trading arm more funds to assist manufacturing. For administrative reasons, this provision could not implemented until May 1947, whereupon the Melbourne City Council successfully challenged its validity in the courts. Only then did Chifley move to nationalise the banks, fearful that reconstruction was being saboutaged.

In 1949, nationalisation was also ruled ultra vires under Section 92 which reads that “trade, commerce and intercourse … among the States shall be absolutely free.” This decision required a majority of the Bench to contort the meaning of “free” from its original intent of not being subject to tariffs into meaning free from government restriction. ALP leaders seized on the judgement to pretend that socialism was impossible without a referendum to alter the Constitution.

What is the constitutional position today? The High Court in 1989 overturned the sloppy definition of “free” in a case about undersized crayfish. It appears that Section 92 is no longer an absolute barrier.

However, a practical obstacle exists from Section 51 (xxxi) which says that property must be acquired on “just terms”. This provision was the deus ex machina in The Castle. If by some miracle, the banks were to be nationalised, we, the people, would have to pay their shareholders their full market value.

The good news is that, if the banks had gone bust, we could pick them up for a song. The bad news is that before they had been devalorised, millions of unemployed would have nothing to sing about.

A government takeover of the banks would buttress the rule of capital by strengthening the state as its executive committee. However, the effect of nationalisation would be marginal without reconstituting the regulatory system dismantled under the Hawke-Keating.

The War of Wealth McQueen on the capitalist crisis